This paper considers an internal model based distributed control approach to the cooperative output regulation problem of heterogeneous linear time-invariant multiagent systems over fixed directed communication graph topologies. First, a new definition of the linear cooperative output regulation problem is introduced in order to allow a broad class of functions to be tracked and rejected by a network of agents. Second, the solvability of this problem with three distributed control laws, namely dynamic state feedback, dynamic output feedback with local measurement, and dynamic output feedback, is investigated by first considering a global condition and then providing an agent-wise local sufficient condition under standard assumptions. Finally, two numerical examples are provided to illustrate the selected contributions of this paper.